


Out Of The Woods

by fireflyslove



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Fix-It, Handwavery, M/M, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Sad Thor, lonely thor
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-27
Updated: 2018-06-02
Packaged: 2019-05-14 07:18:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,302
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14765090
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fireflyslove/pseuds/fireflyslove
Summary: Everything was put right with the universe, but not Thor's universe. Until it was.(Infinity War fix-it where through the power of handwavery and magic everyone lives.)





	1. Into the Woods

**Author's Note:**

> Six years ago I swore I'd never understand Loki fangirls and now here I am writing Thorki fic. Just goes to prove the power of Ragnarok. 
> 
> By the end of this fic everyone who died in IW (save Gamora, although I think in this 'verse, Peter Quill used some Time Stone shenanigans off-screen) will have come back to life. 
> 
> I make some broad, sweeping headcanons for Aesir history and such, and canon is basically an afterthought at this point.
> 
> Bonus points to anyone who can figure out the inspiration (thinly veiled) for the moon.

After it’s all said and done, the universe has been restored to its proper order (almost) and Thanos has been defeated, Thor is still alone. His people, all gone. Even those who had been in the escape pods had died in the ensuing explosion, he was sure. He had defeated the Goddess of Death (not alone, and at a dear cost), but he couldn’t defeat Death itself.

He had a ship, a small one, meant for one or two people on a long journey. It had been the work of a few moments to steal it from the docking bay near the _Milano_ in the spaceport that the Guardians of the Galaxy had visited. Thor enjoyed their company, to be sure, but it was still too much to be around beings who were glad to be together again, had found their family again. His family was gone, gone before the dust had taken half the universe, beyond saving. The Infinity Stones were separated, some destroyed, the others flung to the far corners of the universe, never to be heard from again. The Time Stone had been one of the ones destroyed, its power deemed, even by its former holder, the wizard, to be too great. Thor understood, but it did not lessen his suffering.

He allowed the ship to drift aimlessly through space. He was truly alone here, nothing but him, Stormbreaker, and a few meager supplies. If he wanted to, he could die a quiet death that no one would hear in the vast emptiness of space.

But no. He would not do that. It was against his very nature, and he knew that Odin would be there to greet him in the halls of Valhalla on the day he did die. Besides, if he killed himself now, he might have to see Hela again, and three days with his sister was enough to convince him that he never wanted to see her ever again. Although… but no, he found it unlikely that Loki had gone to the same afterlife as Hela.

It was sometime later, hours, days, or maybe weeks, time had little meaning in space, that he found himself in orbit of a planet. It was a small planet, far from the frequently traveled shipping lanes, and by all appearances, uninhabited by a sentient species. It intrigued him for some reason.

Upon closer inspection, he realized it was actually the moon of another planet, a large gas giant. The entire moon was covered in forest, with plants that resembled the trees of both Asgard and Midgard making up the entirety of the land. It had no major oceans, only lakes and rivers.

With nothing much else to, Thor directed the ship toward the surface. There was a meadow on the shore of a lake that was big enough for the craft to land, and he set it down. Grasping Stormbreaker by the handle, he opened the door and descended the stairs.

The air was crisp and clear, it reminded him of the long summer days of his childhood, spent roaming the forest outside of Asgard proper, with Loki at his side and no more cares in the world than what berries they could eat and if Frigga would scold them for staining their clothes. The trees were tall and dark green, all conifers. An animal, perhaps the kind who would have been a deer on another world, stepped up to the lakeshore to drink, apparently unafraid of Thor. So no large humanoid predators on this moon for it to be afraid of.

It would make a fine place for Thor to settle, at least for a while. He was still young by Asgardian standards, analogous perhaps to a human in his mid-twenties, but he had already lost so much that it was far better to stay here, alone, where he couldn’t hurt anyone else. If the universe truly needed him, it would find him, but for now, he would stay here and mourn his losses.

Frigga his mother, who he had never taken the time to truly grieve.

Odin, for all his faults he had been a good father to Thor as a boy.

The Warriors Three, whose souls he was sure had gone to Valhalla.

The Asgardians slaughtered by Hela on her rampage.

The Asgardians who had been on the ship, sure of their safety, so briefly.

Heimdall, the bane of Thor in his youth, but the steadiest presence in Asgard, beyond even Odin; who in his last act had saved the life of an innocent man.

Loki.

It was too soon to think about Loki. He allowed himself to grieve all the others, but tucked Loki back into the part of his heart where his brother had always, _always_ resided. (If he was being completely honest with himself, he wasn’t entirely convinced Loki was dead. He had already come back from that fate. Twice.)

When he had been younger, his frustration and anger had always been channeled into physical training of some sort or another. With no one here to spar with, he began to swing Stormbreaker at trees, felling them with one strike. As the pile of logs grew, so did an idea in his mind. These trees were tall and straight, unfettered by the restraints of intentional use by a sentient race. Similar trees had been felled by the ancient Aesir for generations, before they were Asgardians, to make their halls. Even Odin had used the same kind of structure to form his hunting lodges and halls on others of the Nine Realms. It was hard, careful work to strip the logs and carve them into the proper shapes, but Thor relished the physical activity.

He did not notice the ring of glass that stretched for a mile in either direction of his basecamp, where lightning had hit the ground repeatedly, melting the soil and reforming it into glass. He also failed to notice the passage of time. The days and nights on this moon were different than Asgard to such a degree that his sleep cycle fell randomly. He slept when he was tired, ate when he was hungry, and drank when he was thirsty. Slowly, the lightning strikes came less and less often, and the hall grew.

It was no rough construction, Thor had channeled all of his skill into making the hall as beautiful as any that had ever graced the hidden glades of Asgard. Even if he was the only being to ever see it, it pleased him to make something with his hands, something not destructive. It was huge, large enough to house the entire population of Asgard that had fled Hela, at least.

Time passed on the moon; Thor hadn’t bothered to give it a name. Winter came, and with it, the snows. He opened the doors as wide as they would go and brought the ship inside the hall. Over the course of the long winter, he began the work of dismantling it, turning it into useful parts, making the hall comfortable and functional. He was still arranging the place as if he were expecting hundreds to come into it.

Spring came, and with it, a restlessness that Thor hadn’t felt since before Ragnarok. As soon as the snows had melted enough, he set off into the hills beyond his lake. One of the walls of the hall, covered in a thick coat of whitewash, soon blossomed with a map of the region.

He ranged far and wide, and soon discovered the extent of the glass ring. He thought it some unnatural phenomenon at first, Thanos or an Infinity Stone come back to haunt him, but then a bolt of lightning broke free from his control in the moment of fear and struck the ground, creating an identical patch of glass.

So Thor passed his time, and the moon spun on into summer. He still had little idea of the passage of time, but this moon was both colder and dimmer than any planet he had spent much time on, and it stood to reason that it might not have been as long as the moon would have him believe.

He had left the communication system of the ship intact, and sometimes turned it on to listen to the goings on in the galaxy, but a passerby was rare enough that he usually just heard cosmic static. Still. It was some way to contact the galaxy. He could, if he needed to, leave the moon by way of the Bifrost, but somehow that power seemed… distant.

Summer turned to fall, and the animals went to hibernate. Thor was more prepared for this winter, more aware of the life of the little world, and had stashed a great quantity of wood away against the cold, as he had dismantled the engine of the ship this summer to make a fishing boat, and it no longer provided warmth. The winter winds came, and with them, a near-constant darkness. Thor knew from stories that his was the way the ancient Aesir had lived, and it gave him a sense of primordial joy to live like this.

All of it was just a distraction.

The deep, soul cleaving damage that the deaths of his people and parents (and brother) had done to him was irreparable, and in moments when he allowed himself to think about it, he froze. The momentum of defeating Thanos and setting the universe to rights had powered him on, but he was still only one man, and so much destruction was bound to exact its price eventually.

It was in the heart of the second winter that Loki came to him in a dream. Strange, Thor hadn’t dreamed since he had come to this planet, but here he was. It was the Loki of their youth, before Jotunheim and the Chitauri, before everything had gone wrong and his world had been turned upside down again and again until Thor didn’t even know which way was up anymore. Dream-Thor ran to Loki, and Loki kept getting further and further away, until he faded into the distance. Here, Thor had unlimited energy and he ran and ran, but Loki was gone, again.

He woke with a start, and a hole in his heart where his brother once lived.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Time is a fickle thing, and although it doesn't actually really affect the plot, I'm thinking time on the moon passes much _slower_ than in the rest of the universe. For what Thor has experienced as about 14 months is more like three years in the rest of the universe.


	2. Through the Dark

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thor, how do you not notice an Entire Snake in your pocket?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In which Thor becomes a woodland princess.

The ice melted slowly the second spring and the animals were slow to return from their migrations and hibernations. The ice on the lake lasted well past what Thor remembered from the last spring. It was still thick enough to walk on weeks later. But spring came, and with it the abundance of green shoots and young animals. The native wildlife was not afraid of him, for the most part. He sustained himself mainly on a diet of foraged plant foods, fish, the occasional trapped small mammal, and until recently, the rations that had been on the ship. He had a decision to make, and soon.

Thor could leave the moon any time he chose, Stormbreaker gave him the power to summon the Bifrost, and to go to anywhere in the Nine— now Eight— Realms. Of course, that would require him to _want_ to leave, for a great deal of the Bifrost summoning was intention, and if he did not want to leave, he would not. But if he were going to remain on this moon, he would need some form of sustenance. The soil was rich and dark, and he had cleared a great swath on the lakeshore for the building of the hall. It would be the work of a few seasons, especially by himself, but he could turn it into usable farmland. But farming required seeds to begin, and he had none. The surrounding forest offered little in the way of cultivatable plants, especially ones he was familiar with. Given a few thousand years, he could make it work, but he did not think he would be living on this world for quite _that_ long. He intended to rejoin the greater universe at some (very) distant point. So for now, Thor needed seeds of plants that he _was_ familiar with. Oats, barley, rye. Onions, cabbages, root vegetables. And perhaps a goat or a few fowl if he was able. It would require a trip off-world, probably to Midgard to get them. And by the time he got the land prepared, it would be too late in the moon’s short seasons to plant. So this year, this year he would rely on the land to support him, ranging farther afield if need be, and storing food against winter.

The removal of stumps from the field might have required an ox or a horse under other circumstances, but Thor used a hitch made of salvaged ship parts and his own brute strength to pull them out. They did not go to waste, they were useful wood, after all. The stones of the nascent field were piled in great mounds for later use. This process took much of the spring and early summer. By the midpoint between the solstice and the equinox, the land lay fallow and ready. He had gathered an audience over the months of his work, a steadily growing number of small and medium animals who gathered at the forest edge to observe him.

They were not _quite_ squirrels, chipmunks, rabbits, foxes, and raccoons, but they were close enough analogues that Thor thought of them as such. Occasionally a deer or, even more rarely, an elk or moose, would come to join their number, but the larger animals were skittish, leaping away into the dark reaches of the forest if he approached too closely. The smallest mammals, the mice and chipmunks and other rodents, were the friendliest, learning to take small treats from his hands. He could not communicate directly with them as he had sometimes been able to do with their Asgardian counterparts, but their intentions were clear enough. The congregation was sometimes joined by birds of every size, songbirds and raptors and pheasants. Interestingly, this world did not seem to have the equivalent to a corvid; raven or crow or jay or magpie or jackdaw. The small lizards and amphibians of the forest were even rarer sights than the large mammals, but Thor sometimes saw the fleeting glimpse of a brightly colored body scuttling off into the undergrowth.

It was a day in the heat of late summer that he finally found himself with nothing to do. The loam of the former forest floor nearly glowed in the heat of the sun. It was a perfectly cloudless day, with the visible sky the almost-colorless blue of those certain high summer days. The sun was slowly westering, but it was still many hours until the near sunset. Thor had landed far enough north on the moon that there was no true sunset in summer, and the sun sometimes did not rise in winter.

He dripped with sweat, the honest sweat of hard work. He had long ago forgone a shirt, it would only need to be washed later, and his skin was bronzed from the sun. Nearly two years had seen his hair grown out, it was now tied back with a thin strip of cord. He had allowed his beard to grow out from the close crop it had been in for centuries, and he frequently wore it with braids and even a few beads he had fashioned over the dark of the second long winter out of boredom.

So he stood, surveying his work, bare feet wriggling in the clean dirt. Thor did something then that he had not done for a very long time, he smiled.

He turned to his animal audience, and they all stood at attention, as if they realized something momentous had occurred. There were more of them than usual, and the back was populated by the shyest great mammals. It felt as though he should address them, but he had not spoken to another living being in two years, so it took him a moment to gather his thoughts.

“Friends,” he said. “I am at a loss for words. So I will say simply, thank you.”

This seemed to be what they were waiting for, and the majority of them, excepting his closer rodent friends, faded into the trees. Those who remained scattered to the open area on the lakeshore, searching for food for themselves. The day was hot enough that Thor thought he would brave the frigid waters of the lake for a brisk swim.

He divested himself of his remaining clothes, a pair of worn pants that had seen better days, and dove in. It was better to go in all at once, rather than to try to ease in. Once the shock wore off, he set out for the far edge of the lake. The ring of glass eclipsed the very far edge, and he usually made it his goal to cross the ring before turning back. The sun was still high in the sky, and his energy still up when he returned to the shore where the hall stood. The heat of the day quickly dried his skin, and he pulled his pants back on, not noticing that they weighed a bit more than when he had taken them off. The field clearing might be done, but there were still a dozen other things that needed doing. Inspecting and rechinking the north wall of the hall was this afternoon’s task.

There was a deposit of rough clay just to the south of the clearing, and he took a container (that had in a previous life been the sink of the ship) and filled it with the white substance. A little water gave it the correct consistency. He reached in his pocket for a cloth to wipe his hands with, despite the fact that they would soon be covered in mud, and recoiled his hand as he felt something soft and scaly in there.

Thor cautiously pulled the pocket away from his thigh, and looked inside. Coiled in the bottom of his pocket was a small green lump. It might have been a frog or a lizard, who had crawled inside to escape the heat of the sun and just remained there, he told himself. He reached inside again and slowly pulled the animal out. It was neither a frog nor a lizard, but a snake.

A small, _green_ snake.

He had never seen its like on this world, and his hand shook as he regarded it. It looked at him through eyes as emerald is its body, unblinking as only a snake’s could be. They stared at each other for what seemed like a life age of the universe, and then Thor spoke.

“Brother?” he asked, not daring to believe it.

The snake moved then, a graceful arc up and out of Thor’s hand.

By the time it reached the ground, it had changed form, and there, in the flesh, stood Loki. He looked thin and slightly gaunt, wearing clothes Thor had never seen before, but he was _here._ Thor reached a hand out and, still shaking, put it on Loki’s shoulder. It was as solid as the ground beneath their feet.

“I told you the sun would shine on us again, brother,” Loki said.

“How?” Thor asked breathlessly.

“It’s a long story,” Loki said. “And it hasn’t ended yet. But that is for the future. For now, I am here. Truly, I am here.”

Thor pulled Loki in to a tight embrace, burying his nose in Loki’s shoulder and hair. To his surprise, Loki returned the gesture, squeezing him nearly as tight as Thor was squeezing Loki.

There were questions still unanswered and many days left to go, but for now, for now it was enough.

**Author's Note:**

> @anakinslefthand on the Tumbls


End file.
